The Carbon Offset Illusion
Why the aviation industry's favourite climate solution may be doing more harm than good.
For every tonne of CO2 emitted, buy a credit. Plant a tree. Problem solved — except it isn't.
Offsetting is the most convenient decarbonisation instrument available to private aviation and the least defensible. For a fraction of the cost of a charter, an operator can declare a flight carbon neutral. The declaration is cheap precisely because the underlying credits often are.
The problem is not that offsetting is fraudulent by nature. It is that the market has historically rewarded volume over quality, and the credits that clear at the lowest price are frequently the ones least able to demonstrate that the emissions reduction would not have happened anyway.
Additionality, permanence, leakage
Three tests separate a credible credit from a decorative one. Additionality asks whether the project would have proceeded without the credit revenue — a question that avoided-deforestation projects have repeatedly struggled to answer. Permanence asks how long the carbon stays out of the atmosphere; a forest that burns in a decade has not offset a flight. Leakage asks whether the activity simply moved elsewhere.
Removal credits — direct air capture, biochar, enhanced weathering — score far better on all three and cost an order of magnitude more. That price gap is the entire story of the voluntary market.
What honest practice looks like
The defensible hierarchy is unchanged and unpopular: reduce what can be reduced, substitute fuel where SAF is genuinely available and verifiable, and only then compensate for the residual — with durable removals, disclosed by project and vintage.
An operator who publishes which credits were retired, from which registry, at which price, is making a claim that can be examined. An operator who publishes only the words carbon neutral is making a claim that cannot.
